Thursday, December 24, 2009

Novus Dorn, Imperial Scholar

For our Dark Heresy campaign (podcast plug here) I am playing an Adept. We have a fairly large group, when they're all at the table anyways, so I felt I could go the route of a less combative character. I've had a lot of fun with it, and am finally finding my niche in the party. Not only that, but I've found that he's not too shabby in combat either! I've painted him up in similar colors to my Imperial Cleric and I will work on getting a group pic of all the Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy characters together.

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Equipment closeups. This is the part where I "converted" the figure to go from medieval traveling monk to a denizen of the 40k universe. The pistol is from the Dark Angel veterans box, it also has a ceremonial "sword" attached. In-game it will represent his Hecuter 9 pistol (just like Eisenhorn carries!) and fortunately we recently dispatched some assassins, so I snatched up a mono-edged knife, just because there was one shown on the figure. The book is also a devotional item from the DA box, and I cut away just enough of it to make it look like the fig is holding it, since he's an Adept after all, he does a lot of reading! The final touch was to put another DA bit on top of his staff in the form of a little winged death's head. I fluffed this in-game by saying it is in the image of Saint Orendel, the saint of the tomb world that the character hails from. The "staff" is really a tetsubo, which is kind of a cool touch. In keeping with true "wysiwyg" fashion, I tried to pick a shock maul up in-game as soon as I could find one so that's what would also be represented on the figure.

The figure itself is from Reaper, and I get more and more impressed with their line every day. I used their "figure finder" and just put in the key words 'bald', 'beard', and 'robes'. When Friar Stone here popped up I knew it was a perfect fit. Just a few bits later and you've got a perfect Dark Heresy fig. The fig is huge however, I'm guessing about 32mm, easily towering over the other figs on the table, so I retconned his size attributes to fit. Now the character is about 6'6" and weighs in at a pretty hefty 350 pounds or so. This also goes a good way to represent his toughness and wounds which are both high for an Adept at 40 toughness and 15 wounds respectively.

@Oz: Nice plug for the podcast! That's right fellow readers, you too can keep up with Novus Dorn's adventures, along with the rest of the acolytes, through the power of radio. Click on the Minions of the Monster link on the right!

To the rest, thanks! Painting up figs for rpgs is pretty rewarding, and you only have to paint one at a time!